A visit to my ob-gyn confirmed his suspicions.
“You’re six weeks—”
I stopped listening. I couldn’t bring myself to come to terms with the words that surely followed. My relationship had started as a fling that somehow stretched, on and off, over a large chunk of my twenties. And, like many relationships that occur in one’s twenties, it was a learning experience in that it wasn’t particularly good for me. All passion, all heated arguments on the phone and in the street and in restaurants and airports and nightclubs. It was never meant to be permanent, even though I quietly wanted it to be, despite the dysfunction.
Hardly the circumstances in which to start a family. So I sprang into survival mode, with the goal being to save a life. Mine.
Gauging that the pregnancy news was not what I wanted to hear, my doctor gave me the details for a clinic. I would have an abortion two days later.
I grew up at a time and in a community in which to get pregnant too early, and outside of the safe confines of marriage, was one of the worst things one could do (with falling into insurmountable debt, a close second). We worked too hard, our grandparents worked too hard, our ancestors went through too much, for me to miss out on my education and the opportunity to fully explore the possibilities of my future. The phrase “respectability politics” wasn’t yet part of the mainstream vernacular.
The daughter of a stay-at-home mother who carefully considered every aspect of my childhood for peak optimization and enthusiastically supported me in exploring every interest (ballet performances, painting workshops, tennis lessons, Girl Scout trips, forensics tournaments, musical theater rehearsals, and so on), I grew up with plenty of space to think big. My aspirations were expansive—so many stories to write, parts of the world to see.
I carried this into my young adulthood. I trailed a group of women hunters in Colorado and spent time on a utopian commune in the Blue Ridge Mountains, all on assignment, all with little thought about how overwhelmingly homogenous those scenarios were because I worked hard and had my education and that was the ticket in life.
In my free time I went on ambitious trips when I could afford them: whale shark diving in Belize, a surf excursion in Costa Rica, beach hopping in Corsica, and fashion week gate-crashing in Paris. Babies didn’t factor in.
So I ruled pregnancy out.
Until it punched me in the gut, literally taking root inside me.
“Some people react like that.”
The nurse said it with a slight shrug, gesturing to the woman hugging, crying, and rocking uncontrollably across from me after the procedure. When I came to, I was sitting in a recovery room with three other women in varying stages of postabortion revival. I had no idea what had taken place before or how I’d gotten there, who might have wheeled me out of the surgeon’s theater and lifted me out of the bed and placed me in my seat. “The anesthesia affects everyone differently,” the nurse explained. She gave me pain medicine and asked me to stay put while they monitored me to make sure I was okay. I stared at the woman ahead of me, who seemed to be releasing all of the emotions I couldn’t muster.
I wondered if there was something wrong with me and if that callousness, the absence of emotion, would haunt me. I was a working adult with a promising career, but I felt younger, less prepared for the heaviness of the scenario. I was a child of Virginia, a child of the Bible Belt, where sex outside of marriage, let alone abortion, was widely considered wrong.
Soon I was bleeding and cramping badly and decided to distract myself from this by checking my phone. My ride, a close girlfriend, was on her way to pick me up. Another girlfriend had checked in to see if we were still on to go to a party in Brooklyn. I had forgotten to cancel. I told her I was ill. When I got home that afternoon I crawled in bed and did not cry but rather slept deeply and soundly.
The next text message I sent was to my boyfriend, days later, ending the relationship. I didn’t want to talk about it. So I quarantined the experience, and the entire relationship, really, and tucked it away.
Later that year I began dating someone wonderful and new. We moved to London and got married a year later. A year after that, we had a baby.
“It’s a boy!” our midwife said, confirming what we already knew. With breathless excitement, she broke the amniotic sac open to reveal a little boxer’s face—eyes, nose, and mouth squashed from baby being pushed out. He was born in the caul in a warm birthing pool two hours after we arrived at the hospital, St. Thomas’s, known for its solid ratings and even better hospital-room views of the Thames, Big Ben, and the Houses of Parliament.
My boy was beautiful and near perfect, smudged face and all. As I held him against my chest, his little legs bent at right angles, resting on top of the milk-padded cushions that had replaced my breasts, I did not think about or imagine how my life might have looked if I’d decided to have a baby that year in New York rather than here in London with the kind and loving man I had decided to marry.
“This is what we call a failed pregnancy”
I wouldn’t think about that day in the small abortion clinic in the Upper East Side in New York for another five years, until I found myself at a hospital in Southeast London once again bleeding, feet in stirrups, staring at a doctor sitting beside my knees as a hollow feeling spread inside me. She was explaining what had happened. A life and a death. “A failed pregnancy.”
When the doctor sent me home after scanning my uterus, finding no heartbeat but instead a wilted placenta the shape of an eggplant, and declaring a miscarriage, she told me they would contact me to schedule removal. My husband, juggling our grief with the logistics of lining up a babysitter for our five-year-old son, asked her a series of questions I can now no longer remember. All business, with eyes on the clock, she ushered us out of the room with a “you’ll hear from us tomorrow.” She did not mention that there was a very good chance that my body would not wait that long. And I was in too great a shock to ask her any further questions.
“A failed pregnancy.”
Failed. Failing. Failure. Falling. Later that night, I was tripping down the steps that led into my bathroom and falling onto the floor, where I remained for the rest of the night.
The doctor didn’t tell us that my uterus would take matters into her own hands in the antisocial hours of the night and that the cramps would feel like contractions—so severe I wouldn’t be able to stand or breathe. She did not indicate that I might black out from the pain and then gain consciousness again. Or prepare me for that eventuality by sending me home with strong pain meds or even a pamphlet about which ones to buy and how to mitigate the discomfort at home. There was no preparation. Only a simple “we’ll call you.”
After having my son, we had waited a while before trying for a second. With no family nearby, the cost of childcare felt prohibitive. We debated whether or not our life—our neat, contained unit of three—could stretch emotionally, logistically, and financially to include one more.
When I found out I was pregnant months before my son turned five, I was ecstatic. I had worried it would be harder the second time around because I was older. When we hosted his birthday party, I had to restrain myself from cradling my abdomen. I felt a constant need to touch my belly as confirmation the pregnancy was really happening. After five years of debating and deliberating over our family planning, the idea of finally having another child felt surreal and thrilling. I was healthy and happy. Grateful. Mentally preparing my mind for the marathon of baby growing and birthing.